WASHINGTON--The bad bets on mortgage-backed securities during the mid-2000s almost broke capitalism itself. From the ensuing bailout of the banks, to the massive intervention by the Fed, to takeovers of AIG and General Motors, not since the 1930s -- when FDR claimed he adopted the views of John Maynard Keynes in order to save capitalism -- had the federal government been summoned to such extraordinary involvement in the financial life of the nation. In both cases, the warnings from the White House to Wall Street to Main Street were the same: Unprecedented action was needed to prevent a further catastrophe.

Against that double historical backdrop comes today's news that Bank of America has offered to pay $17 billion to settle claims filed nationwide alleging it shares responsibility for the collapse. (Important note: No deal is final yet, reports the WSJ.) Last year, Chase agreed to a $13 billion settlement with the DOJ, and last month Citigroup settled for $7 billion.

Some $37 billion in fines and other recompense -- that's a lot of zeroes. But is it enough?

That's not an easy question to answer, and I won't try here. But it's worth thinking about it in a context that is often overlooked. To begin with, the basics: The three companies are hugely successful, and therefore profitable, enterprises. In 2013, Chase's net income was $18 billion on sales of $100 billion. Citigroup earned $13.9 billion on $76.4 billion in revenue. Like the other two, Bank of America's net income jumped sharply in 2013, to $11.4 billion, nearly three times what it was the year before.

Some critics of the banks -- and, often enough, critics of the Obama Administration -- see those figures as one more proof the DOJ is letting the banks off too easy. They'd rather see the bankers themselves punished, perhaps with prison time. (Others, including Texas lawmakers such as Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Dallas, chairman of the Financial Services Committee, have argued that the better lesson from 2008 and since is that taxpayers are too exposed to risk when the federal government backstops the secondary mortgage industry and firms like GM. Rather than over-regulate in the name of consumer protection, he argues, the government should leave the markets -- and their risks -- to the private sector and keep taxpayer money out of play.)

Yesterday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, probably that chamber's most liberal member, sided with those voices. “The greed, recklessness and illegal behavior of Bank of America and other Wall Street firms caused a horrendous recession which cost millions of Americans their homes, jobs and life savings. Given the reality that, as part of the bailout, the Bank of America received more than $1 trillion in virtually zero-interest loans and that nobody from the company has yet gone to jail, this is a very modest settlement.”

There record is pretty clear on much of this. Here, in shorthand, is how the crisis developed.

Banks that lent money to home buyers bundled up those mortgages by the thousands and sold them as novel securities on Wall Street. Eventually, banks sold nearly $1 trillion of these securities, helped along by ratings agencies that signed off on the deals without understanding them. Some of the nation's most respected investment firms were selling the securities at the same time they were quietly betting their own money that they would collapse. (For more on on how Goldman Sachs, for instance, handled both ends of this market, read the April 27, 2010 opening statement from Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan. Sen. Tom Coburn, his republican counterpart, was only slightly less critical. (The committee's Wall Street &amp; the Financial Crisis-Anatomy of a Financial Collapse (FINAL 5-10-11) (1)">report: An anatomy of a Financial Collapse, is worth reading, too.)

That hardly covers the whole scope of the break-down, but if nearly seven years later it all sounds like a house of cards, it's because it was. When the recession hit, and borrowers stopped paying their bills, the mortgages failed and so did the securities. The financial crisis ate some of the nation's most respected firms -- Lehman Brothers failed, and had the government not bailed them out, so too would have General Motors, the AIG insurance conglomerate and the government-backed enterprises known as Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.

Altogether, it spelled the worst recession since the 1930s and the Great Depression. Economists have offered varying views on the lingering costs of the recession, but across the spectrum they agree that Americans alive and working during the recession will likely never recover fully. see, for example, Stanford economist Robert E. Hall of the Hoover Institution, whose study in April concluded: "The financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession left the U.S. economy in an injured state. ... The years since 2007 have been a macroeconomic disaster for the United States of a magnitude unprecedented since the Great Depression."

So should bankers been prosecuted? It's a tough call. Some argue that consumers are better off seeing the enormous payments by the banks. After all, the banks value money.

I raise these questions not to hammer the banks, again. But this settlement carries such large numbers -- let's say it again, $17 billion -- that it's easy to lose sight of the even larger enormity of the crisis for which the banks are being held, in part, liable. Few people alive in this country have ever seen anything like it, and we can hope we never do again.